PCC

I am the man who wrote the book, Convict Conditioning. I am not a perfect man, and my book is not a perfect book; but I hope that when people judge the book, they will say that it got much more right than it got wrong.

They certainly couldn’t say that about the man.

Without improving, evolving, moving forwards, we are nothing. There is no standing still in life—you are either moving forward, or you are losing ground. That’s why I was so excited to be able to contribute to PCC. There is no doubt in my mind that PCC will do for bodyweight training what the RKC has done for kettlebells. And that would be incredible.

A lot of folks have asked me how PCC will be different from Convict Conditioning. I can sum that up in one word: KAVADLO. Al Kavadlo is, for my money, the greatest progressive bodyweight training coach on earth. PCC, as a total system, is much bigger than Convict Conditioning alone because it has been expanded by Al’s methods, tools and tactics. His “new-school” has met my “old-school”, and PCC is the result. PCC is as much Al’s baby as mine—maybe more so. It is flat out false to assume that the PCC is just a “Convict Conditioning cert”. People who love Convict Conditioning will love PCC, because Convict Conditioning forms just a part of PCC. But PCC is more than just Convict Conditioning.

Much more!

PCC: A Black Belt in Bodyweight

Perhaps the most important difference between PCC and Convict Conditioning is the fact that PCC is about principles, not techniques. Convict Conditioning is very easy for athletes to pick up and understand, because it presents six groups of ten techniques. PCC goes deeper than this. Anyone who has ever studied a martial art knows that they need to learn scores of techniques to achieve a black belt; but the closer you get to true mastery, the more you come to understand that it’s not the techniques that matter—nobody can remember a hundred techniques in a fight. What matters are the principles you absorb.

PCC is like this; you will drill and explore dozens of key techniques at the cert workshop; and the PCC Instructor’s Manual analyzes and illustrates over one-hundred and fifty exercises! But at the heart of PCC are the principles of bodyweight progression. Once you grasp these principles, you can make any calisthenics exercise progressive: from a rehab level, right up to epic Bruce Lee-level bad-assery. This is what it’s all about. Some people have accused Convict Conditioning of being too dogmatic; too rigid. Nobody could say the same about PCC, because it’s based on principles, not set exercises paired with progression standards. There is so much more flexibility built in.

(By Giga Paitchadze – Creative Commons License)

Though they play an important role in the early stage, the techniques should not be too mechanical, complex or restrictive. If we cling blindly to them, we shall eventually become bound by their limitations. —Bruce Lee

The punches and kicks—the 14 chains

A martial artist seeks to absorb principles, but he or she can only absorb the general by accumulating the specific—lots and lots of individual punches, kicks, throws, etc. The road to calisthenics mastery ain’t no different. Bodyweight athletes still need to learn individual techniques. They still need to learn about chains—i.e., technical progression sequences. It’s important to note that the fundamental movement-types in Convict Conditioning are all still present in the PCC system; however they have been expanded and added to. The seven fundamental movement chains in PCC are:

Anyone who knows Convict Conditioning well will see that all the major movements are here (save bridges, which I’ll address in a sec). Two new movement chains have been added to the system; the first is the horizontal pull-up. The basic form of this exercise will be well (and painfully) known by Convict Conditioning exponents, but here the progressions have been jacked up to an advanced level to add more symmetry to upper-body work (the vertical handstand push-ups and vertical pull-ups are antagonistic opposites; now the horizontal push-up has an antagonistic “buddy” in the horizontal pull-up). Complete dip progressions—missing from CC—have also been included, with these culminating in one of the most popular of Al’s bar moves: the uber-cool muscle-up (known as a sentry pull-up to CCers).

The muscle-up—part pull-up, part dip—is an advanced technique in the PCC dipping chain.

Where CC progressions can still be found in the PCC system, they are often approached differently, thanks to Al’s input. For example hanging straight leg raises are real popular in jails: but we got the feedback from athletes on the outside that they were just too easy. So we have expanded and advanced the progressions, making the advanced techniques much, much harder. One-leg squats have also been made harder. Everything is at a higher turn of the spiral. More progression options have been included for pull-ups and push-ups. Extra handstand pushups variations have been included.

As I have said, the PCC system is much larger than Convict Conditioning. Convict Conditioning is really about building raw muscle and motive power by utilizing fairly basic, fairly brutal, pulling, pushing and leg movements. But bodyweight strength training is about more than that—static holds, for example. Whereas Convict Conditioning didn’t include full progressions for static holds, PCC does. The system includes 7 static chains:

1. Press holds—building to—the elbow lever

2. Midsection holds—building to—the L-hold

3. Bridge holds—building to—the gecko bridge

4. Handstands—building to—the frog-press handstand

5. The back lever—building to—the full back lever

6. The front lever—building to—the full front lever

7. The side lever—building to—the press flag

That’s a pretty damn impressive roll-call of techniques: and very few men or women outside of professional gymnastics could complete all seven. Fewer still could assimilate or teach chains for all seven. But this knowledge is part of the PCC system thanks to Al’s know-how, and has been integrated into PCC because I’ve been asked so often about these holds; athletes want to learn about old school hand-balancing, flags, elbow levers, and so on. Fans of bridges wanted to know how I would include them as a form of static hold. All this is contained in the PCC system. This doesn’t mean you can’t begin using these “holds” as “moves”—levering up from a bridge into a handstand, for example. Remember, everything is about principles, not dogma. Once you understand how to work with the techniques, you can expand; you can explore. You learn the form, you absorb the form, you discard the form.

A bodyweight powerhouse, Al Kavadlo is no stranger to static holds. Perfection!

The PCC Instructor’s Manual will cover all 14 chains in-depth (it’s over 600 pages), but it will only be available to athletes who attend the PCC event. The certification workshop itself cannot cover all 14 chains—over 150 exercises—but it has been painstakingly designed to cover the key techniques, training methods, and the principles behind progression.

The eleven training modules and two seminars over the three-day workshop will revolutionize you: no matter what your level of development. Sure, you may not come away able to perform expert hand-balancing, elbow levers, front-levers, one-arm pull-ups and human flags, but I promise you this: you WILL come away knowing exactly how to get there—or get someone else there—in the best way possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson—the great Patriot, and possibly the greatest essayist of all time—said this:

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Come and join us in the PCC community. The principles you need to maximize your bodyweight potential are waiting here for you.

The new Progressive Calisthenics Certification is open to anybody who wants to learn more about bodyweight strength. I know it will be a fantastic resource for martial artists, personal trainers, footballers and yoga masters. But I also want to draw in a group of athletes real close to my heart—bodybuilders.

You might be surprised to hear me talk of a fondness for bodybuilding. I am known as a guy who pushes realistic, athletic workouts: not pumping and posing in a thong. Hell, I admit it: I have taken my share of potshots at the bodybuilding scene.

But bodybuilding is a bigger world than most folks give it credit for. Yeah, the idiot shooting himself full of thousands of dollars worth of dangerous crap while training like a schlub is a bodybuilder. But so is the guy trying to lose a little tub, while putting an inch on his arms. So is the underweight girl who trains hard to fill out skinny limbs and turn her flat ol’ butt into a nice round booty. So is the disciplined grandpa or grandma who wants to hold aging at bay by restocking their skeleton with some quality meat. In fact, the vast majority of folks who start training want to build some muscle, for whatever reason.

They are bodybuilding, whether they know it or not.

Bodyweight training builds muscle—but you need to make it progressive.

One of the great tragedies of the modern fitness world is that bodybuilding has become—maybe indelibly—connected to training on machines and other forms of equipment. You do not need special equipment to build muscle—what you need, first and foremost, is your body’s own weight.

Hey, everyone knows my opinion on this. You don’t need to listen to me. How about the guy who made all the training machines so famous?

Arthur Jones was—without doubt—the biggest figure in the history of training machines. It is unlikely that anyone will ever eclipse his success. The man is still a famous and controversial figure in strength and conditioning, years after his death. Jones was an inventor, exercise ideologist, genius, and ass-kicker. He single-handedly invented the Nautilus brand of machines back in the sixties. His son developed the popular Hammer Strength brand of training machines, and Nautilus Inc. has branched out and now also owns Schwinn, Universal, Bowflex and Stairmaster. Every exercise machine, in every gym, all over the planet, has been influenced by Jones in some way.

Arthur Jones participating in his brainchild, the infamous “Colorado Experiment”.

This should tell you something. Arthur Jones was the poppa of training machines.

So you would assume that Jones—above all people—would have sung the praises of machines? You’d probably guess that Jones would be doing all he could to spread the idea that building muscle needs to happen on expensive machines, right?

Wrong. Jones was a straight talker. At the height of his fame he caused thousands of jaws to drop when he published this:

“…just about anybody else in this country can produce nearly all of the potential benefits of proper exercise without spending much if anything in excess of about twenty dollars. You can build both a chinning bar and a pair of parallel dip bars for a total cost of only a few dollars, and those two exercises, chins and dips, if properly performed, will stimulate muscular growth in your upper body and arms that will eventually lead to muscular size and strength that is very close to your potential.

Adding full squats, eventually leading up to one-legged full squats, and one-legged calf raises, will do much the same thing for your legs and hips. Using this very simple routine, when you get strong enough to perform about ten repetitions of one-armed chins with each arm, your arms will leave very little to be desired.

Or, instead, you can do what many thousands of others are now doing and piss away thousands of dollars and years of largely wasted effort while producing far less results. The choice is yours.

One of the best pair of arms that I ever saw on a man belonged to a guy that I knew about fifty years ago in New York, and he never performed any sort of exercise apart from chins and dips, and damned few of them.” – Arthur Jones, My First Half-Century in the Iron Game

Interesting words, huh?

I’m not saying nobody should use machines—PCC isn’t about telling athletes what not to do. But when the guy who practically brought about the exercise machine revolution tells you that bodyweight works just as well, it counts for something.

Arthur Jones oversees Mr Universe, the great Boyer Coe, through a set of chin-ups.

The PCC curriculum is an expansion of Convict Conditioning; it includes both progressive pull-ups and progressive dipping chains; not to mention the one-leg squat progressions referred to by Jones.

Take this as an open invitation. PCC is not just for “functional” trainers and cross-training athletes. If you want to build some muscle—or if your job is to help others build muscle—participation at the inaugural PCC event will be a massive opportunity, either to maximize your own ability, or to fulfill your potential to help others.

You never get a second chance at being the first. Please don’t miss this one.

What are the two most remarkable events in the history of Dragon Door?

The first event was Dragon Door’s launch of the modern kettlebell movement and in particular the world’s first-ever kettlebell instructor certification program, the RKC in 2001. The impact worldwide has been astonishing and a joy to behold.

However, another event occurred in 2009 that may prove to have an equivalent impact on world fitness to Dragon Door’s championing of the kettlebell.

And that would be the launch of Paul Wade’s Convict Conditioning bodyweight exercise program. Convict Conditioning stormed to #1 bestseller status and has become Dragon Door’s most successful title of all time.

More than anything, it is because of Paul Wade’s brilliant system of progressions, based around six core exercises for supreme survival strength: pushups, pullups, squats, hanging leg raises, bridges and handstand pushups. With Paul’s progressions, you can begin with minimal ability and realistically, safely stack strength on strength—until you are as functionally strong as you could ever want to be. And then some…

The fitness world took notice—and history is being made as we speak.

Now, Dragon Door and Paul Wade are presenting an opportunity for trainers and bodyweight exercise enthusiasts worldwide to plunge deeper into the Convict Conditioning programs, with the Progressive Calisthenics Certification Workshop—to both master the progressions personally and be qualified to teach them to others.

If there is a white-hot trend in fitness right now, it’s bodyweight strength training. Athletes of all kinds are looking to the toughest, most brutally productive calisthenics techniques to spice up their workouts. We’re talking one-arm push-ups, pistols, pull-ups, handstands and hanging levers…

To ensure that the bodyweight exercise community worldwide has a go-to educational resource to support their interest, Dragon Door is establishing the Progressive Calisthenics Blog. We intend this to become THE blog for high-level, practical, cutting edge articles and videos on all things bodyweight.

Besides regular contributions from Dragon authors Paul Wade and Al Kavadlo, expect to see some of the top names in bodyweight contribute their expertise.

Dragon Door Publications / The author(s) and publisher of this material are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any injury that may occur through following the instructions or opinions contained in this material. The activities, physical and otherwise, described herein for informational purposes only, may be too strenuous or dangerous for some people, and the reader(s) should consult a physician before engaging in them.